Nearly 28,000 years ago, a teenage boy was buried with care in a cave in what is now northern Italy, a spectacular shell cap covering his head and a flint blade grasped in his right hand. Archaeologists have now determined his cause of death: a bear attack.
"He probably lost consciousness during the event and never regained it," Vitale Sparacello, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, told Live Science in an email. "We know that these people hunted bears and that bears tend to avoid humans whenever they can, but a fortuitous encounter is still possible."
